i am currently adding characters to quiver(green arrow) and would like to know whether mia dearden should be put in as speedy even though she hasn't taken that alias yet or if a seperate entry in characters should be made for her

Does that count for all instances? For example, in Animal Man, I put James Highwater in as Psycho Pirate III for all the issues he appeared even though he only took up that mantle in one of his last appearances. Also, when I created the character entry for Maxwell Lord, I put his codename as Black King, but he was just "Maxwell Lord" for over a decade and it doesn't seem right to add him the way he is to old Justice League issues.

This was a question asked back on the old CGS forums and the answer was to use your best judgment. If the character was a signifcantly different person for a significant period of time and then changed to a different identity, they can be divided up.

I'm with the judgement calls here. In the Quiver storyline, I'd say that Mia is a different character than Speedy, the same with Maxwell Lord in the Justice League. There are also books where someone appears in their civilian identities and NOT as their superhero counterpart, for instance in the Spectre run from Adventure Comics, Clark Kent is featured as reporting on a rash of mysterious deaths and he never once appears as Superman, however his appearance is significant enough to warrant an appearance as "Clark Kent", IMHO.

That wasn't Clark Kent, it was a guy who looked like him as I recall (Earl Crawford?)-- it was a running gag that people kept asking if he was Clark Kent and if he was really Superman. But there were definitely some stories where Clark Kent didn't appear as Superman (The "Private Life of Clark Kent" series, for example).

Wow. I think this is REALLY splitting hairs. Superman IS Clark Kent and vice versa. Just because he doesn't change into costume doesn't make him any less Superman. As for Mia with Quiver, you'd have to go back and change listings on a whole slew of "origin" stories to say that the first appearance of one wasn't the first appearance of the other (the Spectre, the Sword, Wraithborn--to name but a few from a wide array of publishers and eras--don't really feature the character-in-costume or the character by their super-name). That they don't appear as one or the other is really something you can and should give in the synopses or notes, as far as I'm concerned.

Not to mention that splitting the characters into two separate entries is a philosophical slap in the face to the whole concept of what it means to be a superhero.

For me, the only time I'd consider listing an identiy and a superhero separate is when the character is primarily a non-superhero, as with Insect Queen, the pre-Crisis Flamebird (I). or the like.

I guess this would be WAY down the list of stuff to tweak, but maybe at some far-off distant point there might be an option to enter the character as his or her alter-ego first (and the super-identity in brackets afterwards?). Not so much for the Clark Kent example (I agree it's unnecessary), but for a character who didn't get a super-identity for ages and who only appeared as their civilian selves for a significant period of time before it happened (for example, Tex Thompson in the early Action Comics only became Mister America after the strip had been running for a few years -- entering him as Mister America for those stories is kind of misleading). But sure, it's not a priority.